Abstract

In the first hours of a disaster, up-to-date information about the area of interest is crucial for effective disaster management. However, due to the delay induced by collecting and analysing satellite imagery, disaster management systems like the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS) are currently not able to provide information products until up to 48-72 h after a disaster event has occurred. While satellite imagery is still a valuable source for disaster management, information products can be improved through complementing them with user-generated data like social media posts or crowdsourced data. The advantage of these new kinds of data is that they are continuously produced in a timely fashion because users actively participate throughout an event and share related information. The research project Evolution of Emergency Copernicus services (E2mC) aims to integrate these novel data into a new EMS service component called Witness, which is presented in this paper. Like this, the timeliness and accuracy of geospatial information products provided to civil protection authorities can be improved through leveraging user-generated data. This paper sketches the developed system architecture, describes applicable scenarios and presents several preliminary case studies, providing evidence that the scientific and operational goals have been achieved.

Social crisis map for 2014 Southern England floods–the areas in red refer to maps produced in the EMSR069 Copernicus rapid mapping activation; tweets are clustered based on their geographical location which is visualised as the absolute number of tweets containing an image. The clusters, represented as orange/yellow/green circles point out the size of the cluster from largest to smallest; by clicking on a number, all underlying tweets are displayed together with an outline of the area in blue.

Example of a WebGIS interface showing geolocated social media data overlaid on the flood extent of the UK floods in 2014 (The activity was carried out under a programme of, and funded by, the European Space Agency) [].